The world moves so fast that the employees on my team have become almost obsolete in their day-to-day duties. When I hired them, when my work unit was put together, they were the best options among the staff and on the market. They were even the best candidates who applied for the positions we advertised.
Time and progress have left their training outdated and full of gaps, which causes productivity problems, and my department isn’t responding properly to the needs of the business.
That hurts the company and my performance as a team leader, and… I don’t know how to fix it.
Development reviews
This is the regular interview, at least once a year, with each member of your team. It’s the meeting where we go over the team member’s past, present and future in the business area assigned to them. We analyse their strengths and weaknesses. We set out solutions to problems and establish challenges for the coming months.
The employee shouldn’t have to make all the effort; the company must support them and help them improve. One of the tools for doing so is targeted training on the aspects of their work that need improving.
The development interview should look for those needs. Imagine our employee handles customer complaints. They have to put up with customers’ complaints and resolve them. They resolve everything, but at a higher cost to the company. The customer is satisfied, but the bottom line suffers because of the costs incurred.
In our development review we discover that this employee doesn’t know how to say NO to customers. We need to train them, teach them and support them in finding a way to turn down some of the complaints in which the customer takes advantage of this weakness. This is what the development interview brings to light.
Draw up a training plan
It turns out that another colleague can’t say no to suppliers and buys unnecessary supplies every time the sales rep visits. That’s another employee who doesn’t know how to refuse, and it pushes up costs.
If we get the first employee to stop granting every customer complaint (especially unjustified ones, such as those filed after the deadline) and the second to stop buying unnecessary supplies, we will spend less in our department and deliver better results for the business as a whole.
We need to find a training activity that teaches our employees to say NO and to negotiate other solutions with customers and suppliers that don’t involve costs for the company.
Featured image: Seattle Municipal Archives, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
